How to wipe a HD?

[david walcroft]

jludwig wrote:
> On Wednesday 20 April 2005 08:34 pm, david walcroft wrote:
> 
>>Vinicius wrote:
>>
>>>Hello,
>>>
>>>How to wipe a HD, please?
>>>
>>>Atte.,
>>>Vinicius.
>>
>>Give this a try ,its a boot floppy and overwrites from 1 > 25 times as
>>selected (but slowly!!!)
>>
>>http://staff.washington.edu/idlarios/autoclave/clave03.img
>>
>>david >
> 
> Try 
> man shred
> 
> Shred is the linux utility for cleaning hard drives.
>    Delete FILE(s) if --remove (-u) is specified.  The default is  not  to
>        remove  the files because it is common to operate on device files like
>        /dev/hda, and those files usually should not be removed.  When operat-
>        ing on regular files, most people use the --remove option.
> 
>        CAUTION:  Note  that shred relies on a very important assumption: that
>        the filesystem overwrites data in place.  This is the traditional  way
>        to  do  things, but many modern filesystem designs do not satisfy this
>        assumption.  The following are examples of filesystems on which  shred
>        is not effective:
> 
>        * log-structured or journaled filesystems, such as those supplied with
> 
>               AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.)
> 
>        * filesystems that write redundant data and  carry  on  even  if  some
>        writes
> 
>               fail, such as RAID-based filesystems
> 
>        *  filesystems  that  make  snapshots, such as Network Appliance’s NFS
>        server
> 
>        * filesystems that cache in temporary locations, such as NFS
> 
>               version 3 clients
> 
>        * compressed filesystems
> 
>        In addition, file system backups and remote mirrors may contain copies
>        of  the  file  that  cannot be removed, and that will allow a shredded
>        file to be recovered later.
> 
Autoclave uses Shred and I use ext3 filesystem and Autoclave wiped my 
disk but I didn't test the disk (WD 120GB) to see how it performed.

   david